Your homelab has twenty services. You bookmarked them in three browsers, lost the spreadsheet, and the "Infrastructure" folder is a graveyard of dead IPs from before you moved everything to Tailscale. You don't need another RSS reader. You need a pretty launch page with green dots that tell you what's actually up.
Dashy is that page — with more glitter than strictly necessary. ~25k GitHub stars, MIT-licensed, and a self-hosted personal dashboard built around bookmarks, status checks, widgets, and themes until your start page looks exactly how you want. The tagline isn't wrong: "the most customizable dashboard for self-hosters."
What it actually does
Dashy is a configurable app launcher with polish. Organize links into sections on one or more pages. Each item can show a live status indicator — ping the URL, see green/red without opening Uptime Kuma in another tab.
Widgets. Embed dynamic content from self-hosted services — stats, feeds, custom API JSON. Not as deep as Homepage's 100+ native integrations, but flexible enough for homelab dashboards that mix links and live data.
UI config editor. Start from YAML in user-data/conf.yml, then tweak layout, colors, icons, and sections in the browser without redeploying. Drag sections, hide components, save back to config. Homelabbers who hate hand-editing YAML every time they add Jellyfin will appreciate this.
Theming rabbit hole. Built-in color themes, custom CSS, background images, Font Awesome and homelab icon packs, auto-fetched favicons, emojis. Workspace view for switching between apps. Minimal view for a fast-loading browser start page. Multi-language support.
Auth optional. Multi-user access, privilege levels, SSO — lock the dashboard behind login if it's exposed beyond VPN.
Vue.js frontend, small bundle, PWA for basic offline access. Docker image lissy93/dashy on port 8080 inside the container.
Dashy vs Homepage vs Glance
We've covered the other homelab dashboards:
- Glance — morning feed reader (RSS, HN, Reddit, weather). News, not app launchers.
- Homepage — service command centre with 100+ API widgets and Docker label discovery. Deep integrations (Plex stats, Pi-hole blocks, qBittorrent queues).
- Dashy — maximum customization for bookmark boards with status dots, themes, and a visual editor. Less integration depth than Homepage; more layout freedom than either.
Pick Homepage when widget APIs matter. Pick Glance when you read the internet over coffee. Pick Dashy when you want the start page to look like your homelab — sections, colors, icons, status checks — and you'd rather click than YAML-edit every tweak.
Why self-host?
Your service map is private. Internal URLs, Tailscale hostnames, admin panels — that's not data for a third-party start.me account.
Status without SaaS. Built-in link monitoring on the same page you launch from. Pair with Uptime Kuma for alerts; Dashy for the visual "is it green?" check when you open the browser.
MIT and boring to host. Single container, config on a volume, low RAM. Runs fine on a Canadian VPS next to the services it links to.
Canadian homelab. Dashboard stays on infrastructure you control — relevant when client-facing ops pages shouldn't sit on US freemium platforms.
What running it takes
Quick Docker run:
docker run -d -p 4000:8080 \
-v /path/to/user-data:/app/user-data \
--name dashy --restart=always \
lissy93/dashy:latestMount user-data with a conf.yml inside — that's your dashboard config. Official docker-compose.yml in the repo for persistent setups.
Plan minimal RAM — Dashy is lightweight compared to Next.js Homepage. Put HTTPS and auth in front if exposed publicly. Optional encrypted cloud backup/sync exists if you want off-site config backup without self-managing it.
Who it's for (and who should skip it)
Good fit: homelabbers who care how the dashboard looks, families sharing a pretty link board to media and photos, anyone who wants status checks on bookmarks without a separate monitoring UI, YAML-averse users who prefer the visual config editor.
Maybe skip it: you need Plex/Tautulli/Sonarr widgets with deep API stats — Homepage wins. You want news feeds as the main event — Glance. You have three bookmarks — a browser folder is fine.
Hosting it in Canada
Dashy is a small Docker app — we run it on Canadian VPS and Docker hosting alongside your stack, TLS on your dashboard subdomain, volume backups for conf.yml and custom assets.
Tell us how many services you're linking — we'll get you a green-dot start page before you spend another Sunday tweaking themes.
